1. Field of Invention
The invention relates to a communication system that makes any desired information available, for example, to a cellular phone via the Internet.
2. Description of Related Art
There have been provided technologies to obtain various pieces of information on the Internet from cellular phones. The cellular phones comprise monitors on which the obtained textual information is displayed. There is a problem that the cellular phones have limitations on the volume of textual information displayed on the monitors (namely, the number of characters, such as alphabetic, numerals and symbols) because the monitors do not have large display areas. Accordingly, textual information containing a small number of characters (such as e-mails) can be displayed on the monitors such that users will not have any serious inconvenience in reading the displayed textual information. However, it is impossible to display all of the textual information on the monitor at once. If desired, it is necessary to browse the textual information where there is a large number of characters (such as web pages in a web site) to pick up some or all of the information. In that case, the user has to scroll through a massive amount of textual information again and again. This results in time- and labor-consuming operations for the user.
To avoid scrolling through the textual information, the textual information is usually converted into HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) or XML (Extended Markup Language) format, thereby giving an abridgment of the textual information. In this case, it is not necessary to scroll the textual information again and again, but it is impossible to view the missing information, which has been omitted during abridging the textual information, even if the users desire to do so.
In the view of the foregoing, the invention has been developed to resolve the above-mentioned and other problems.
According to one aspect of the invention, there is provided a communication system comprising a client device, a first information transmitting device and a second information transmitting device. The client device comprises a textual information request unit that makes a request for at least one piece of textual information, a textual information receive unit that receives an abridged version of the requested textual information, a display unit that displays the abridged version of the requested textual information, a voice information request unit that makes a request for voice information corresponding to an unabridged version of the requested textual information, a voice information receive unit that receives the voice information, and a reproducing unit that reproduces the voice information. The first information transmitting device comprises a request information receive unit that receives the unabridged version of the textual information, an abridging unit that abridges the unabridged version of the textual information received by the request information receive unit and produces the abridged version of the textual information, a converting unit that converts the unabridged version of the textual information into the voice information, a textual information transmit unit that transmits the abridged version of the textual information produced by the abridging unit to the textual information receive unit upon request from the textual information request unit, and a voice information transmit unit that transmits the voice information produced by the converting unit upon request from the voice information request unit. The second information transmitting device comprises a storage unit that stores the unabridged version of the textual information and a storage information transmit unit that retrieves, from the storage unit, the unabridged version of the textual information requested by the textual information request unit, and transmits the retrieved unabridged version of the textual information to the request information receive unit.
According to another aspect of the invention, there is provided an information transmitting device, comprising an abridging unit that abridges textual information and produces an abridged version of the textual information, a converting unit that converts the textual information into voice information, and an output unit that outputs at least one of the abridged version of the textual information and the voice information to a client device.